Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
Wreck from Addicted to WoW sent us his interesting opinion on the Season 3 gear required ratings. Why, he asks, didn't Blizzard put rating requirements on all the gear? When season 3 starts, the season 3 shoulders and weapons will require a high Arena rating to own (2000 and 1850), and Wreck wants to know why only the shoulders and weapons got put behind a rating wall. Why not make all the gear that much harder to get?
As far as I know, the cited reason behind the ratings was to keep raiders from losing in the Arenas and still getting gear. The weapons in season 3 are terrific, even compared to the mid-endgame raiding gear, and so raiders were playing just their 10 games every week, saving up Arena points, and grabbing the hot weapons. Blizzard didn't want that happening, so they put the requirement on the weapons-- you have to be good to wield those now.
But the shoulders I don't quite understand. I've been told that the shoulders are the most obvious piece of "leet" armor, and that Blizzard, as Wreck says, really wants seeing those shoulders on someone to be a sign that they're really good in the Arenas. But shoulders? As a few players have said, give them a title or something if you want them to be recognized. There's good reason for putting the weapons behind a rating, but if you're going to put shoulders back there too, you might as well require the rating for all the pieces, or leave the armor out of it completely.
Mashing up two zones is always fascinating to me. Baron Soosdoon recently filmed NetherVale, a fusion of Stranglethorn Vale and Netherstorm. Today I found a movie by a different Machinimist showing what it would be like if the Elwynn Forest merged with the Emerald Dream.
I don't know about you, but I would love to see the zone temporarily transformed like this on the Live servers. Blizzard talks about keeping the old content alive. This would have me ditching out of the Outlands in a hot second.
Reader Gotpriest of Crushridge sends in this fascinating screenshot. Want to take any guesses as to where it was taken? Go on -- think about it. I'll wait.
Still not sure? That's okay, I wouldn't know either if Gotpriest hadn't mentioned it. In fact, we're looking at none other than Orgrimmar. There's little waterfall in the back of Orgrimmar's local fishing pool and you can get unusual graphical effects when your camera is shooting through water. (Also, I'm guessing Gotpriest is Levitating while in Shadowform to give the typical this-is-my-character screenshot that extra-special touch.)
Do you have a unique shot of Azeroth or Outland that you'd like to show off to the rest of the world? Tell us about it by e-mailing a copy to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com, with as much or as little detail as you'd like to share with the world!
Yesterday a new build went live on the patch 2.3 PTRs, including some pretty big stuff. Some of these things we knew were coming in some form, but since they hadn't been seen on the PTR yet we didn't know the specific details. The ever-reliable Boubouille of MMO-Champion has the details. The most significant changes (in my opinion) are:
[Druid] If you are in a shapeshift form and try to use an ability that may only be used in caster form, you will leave the form and use that ability. This means that you can shift from one form to another in one action. If you don't have mana to shift form, you will get an error message and remain in your current form. This can be disabled with /console autoUnshift 0.
[Hunter] Aimed Shot (Marksmanship) now reduces healing done to that target by 50% for 10 seconds.
[Paladin] Precision (Protection) now increases spell hit chance as well.
[Priest] If you are in Shadowform and try to use an ability that my not be used in Shadowform, you will leave Shadowform and use that ability. This can be disabled with /console autoUnshift 0
[Rogue] Cheat Death (Subtlety) chance to trigger increased to 33/66/100% [up from 10/20/30%] and now also causes the rogue to take 90% less damage for 3 seconds when the effect triggers. This effect cannot occur more than once per minute.
Creature AI has been changed to no longer prioritize attacking unfeared targets over feared targets.
Bolding and underlining are not tools I use lightly, but holy jumping monkeys did you see that Cheat Death change?! If I'm reading this correctly (and I've never had the talent, so it's possible I'm not), this says that with 3/3 talent points, Cheat Death will confer on the rogue a 100% chance to "completely avoid any damaging attack that would otherwise kill you" (as the talent is worded), as well as reducing all damage taken by 90% for 3 seconds, on a one-minute cooldown. Take that, suddenly-raid-viable Ret pallies! Sub rogues now can't die unless they receive a deathblow more than once in a minute!
The fear change is also quite a big deal. It seems to mean, among other things, tanks shouldn't lose aggro when feared anymore, so you won't need to stance dance to avoid getting feared while tanking. Onyxia just got considerably easier; too bad she's irrelevant these days. Also, the Priest talent "Unbreakable Will" will no longer be a liability. Anyway, read on for the full list of changes.
Sorry to start your Tuesday morning with such horrid, gut wrenchingly bad news, guys and gals. This week's /silly comic is a longer work of sequential art then the ones I've posted previously, and its taking a bit more time to complete then I intended. So I'm going to have to take the next few nights to finish the comic up and have something for your optical enjoyment by Thursday. In the mean time, I offer up the above page out of my sketchbook to tide you over, a concept I had dreamed up for Gnomish racial armor. I figured that each piece of the set would have its own on click ability, something odd and most likely electricity based with a chance of completely backfiring upon yourself and/or your entire party. Fun times to be had by all!
Blizzard stated that one of the reasons they choose the Death Knight as the first Hero Class to introduce to the game was to address the shortage of tanks. But with Warriors, Paladins and Druids already fulfilling the tanking role, is it really a lack of choices?
Or is it the lack of fun of being a tank. No one wants to be low on the dps, but that's often a trade off tanks (and healers) must make to do their job protecting their teammates. How is the Death Knight going to address that? And should it?
What is fun about being a tank and how can Blizzard make it more enjoyable?
Does your guild run out of space, even after spending cash on a second account to run your bank alt system? Have 16,000g lying around collecting dust? Well, you're in luck, pretty soon a new feature being added to the game will change all that. Niko at WorldofRaids has posted an update on what we can expect with the guild bank feature being added to the game in Patch 2.3.
Each guild will have access to six tabs, each with 98 slots of available storage space. The first tab will cost 1g to purchase, with the costs rising exponentially until you reach the sixth tab, which will cost you 10,000g. Doing the math, Niko figured out that it you will have to spend 16, 111g for all 588 slots currently available on the system as it stands on the PTR. Access seems a bit tricky. It's either a you can remove items or you can't kind of system, which means you really need to have faith in those with access. Those who do have access can also use guild funds to repair their equipment should they need to do so.
Does this seem a bit expensive to you? I know it does to me. On one hand I know that with my bank alt I was full rather quickly, so all those slots will be most welcome. But I don't see anyone other than officers in my guild ponying up the cash for bank slots. So the guild banks might end up being a tough sell to the smaller guilds. I'm just not sure yet. We'll have to see.
These images just keep making me laugh. Over the weekend, we posted pictures of people having fun with the Beerfest goggles around famous Azerothian NPCs, and although my original request of Illidan never panned out (he's not a humanoid, apparently, and thus not susceptible to the effects of beer goggles), you readers responded with tons of funny pictures featuring our fearless leaders as Gnomes and female Orcs.
So here they are all collected into a gallery, and if you have any more, feel free to drop us a note with links to them, and I'll add them in. Thanks to all the commenters who posted links for these pics: Nate S., myrlin, Haaken, erin, and s02.
Just in case you weren't at the Machinima Europe Festival the other weekend, you might like to know: Bloodspell is out. The feature-length machinima film (created with Neverwinter Nights) has been released, in both streaming and downloadable versions. The film was released by machinimakers Strange Company, who have also worked in Azeroth before. And two of them, founder Hugh Hancock and Johnnie Ingram, were nice enough to sit down and chat with us about Bloodspell, the future of Machinima, and their new book, Machinima for Dummies.
Still no word on the Bloodspell DVD, which we were told was going to be released as a downloadable disk with all kinds of commentaries and extras. Strange Company only says that it is still coming, in the next two or three months. And if you can't bear to watch anything that hasn't been created in WoW, there's good news for you, too-- Hugh tells us that he is planning to work on more WoW machinima soon.
This blog post is careening around the blogsphere at large, and it probably behooves us to mention it here on WoW Insider, considering the points it makes about WoW players. It's a variation on the red state/blue state argument, in that it points out that there are actually more Warcraft players in the United States today than there are professional farmers. And so, says the piece, when someone, be they politician or pundit or newscaster, says that "the real America" is rural farmland where people are more likely to be milking cows than running Karazhan, they're wrong.
There are a few problems with this argument, of course, one of which is admitted to in the article: farming and World of Warcraft-playing are hardly mutually exclusive. Just because you read blogs and play MMOs doesn't mean you're not a person who wakes up in the morning and gets your eggs out from under chickens. The other issue is that if you're going to start fighting nostalgia, you're going to lose. Every generation looks at the future (or in this case, the rapidly approaching present) and compares it unfavorably to the past. I've always thought it amazing that someday we will have someone in the White House who knows how to get 30 extra lives in Contra, and that person will probably look at the new holo-vid-games that come out in 2016 and say "when we were young, we played with buttons and thumbsticks!"
But back to the issue at hand: it's true-- America is becoming a technological, urban country, and whether you like it or not (politics completely aside, because I know how much you guys like those on this gaming blog), it's a fact that a person on the street is more likely to know what day Brewfest starts rather than when the summer solstice hits. Sure, we're not seeing the latest class changes on the evening news, but we are seeing Warcraft selling trucks, and whether newscasters and politicians are recognizing it or not, the MMO culture is becoming more and more massive every day.
We really love these player-run parties (how did that AzerothCross go the other week, anyway?), so here's another one for you this weekend. This time around, your host is Kernhoof on Silver Hand (finally, the US realms get their own event), who wants to celebrate his unthinkable accomplishment-- not only did he grind up Bloodsail rep to Honored, but he then went back and killed tons of Venture Co. goblins to bring his Steamwheedle Cartel rep back to neutral. So now he can wear the Bloodsail hat with pride, and walk around Booty Bay without getting stomped on by the bruisers. Awesome.
Sounds like cause for celebration to me. The party kicks off this Sunday, October 28th on Silver Hand at 1pm server in Booty Bay, and since the guards there aren't going to be drunk or anything (like they are on New Year's Eve), it probably won't turn into a bloodbath. Probably. But even if it does, should be a good time no matter what-- sounds like Kernhoof has even invited a few GMs to show up. As always, if you go and check it out, make sure to send us your screenshots!
Blizzard says we do, and it's an old standard of the MMO genre that someone stands up front and annoys the monster into hitting him, so that healing can be concentrated and DPS doesn't have to take a beating that would likely kill it. But do we really need tanks, or should the game move away from emphasis on the tanking/DPS/healing troika?
Everyone in the game can DPS and many choose to: DPS classes seem to be the most popular. We could debate why all day, but at the end whether it's 'big number syndrome' or it comes from a desire to feel more like you're actually hurting the monster than simply poking it with a sharp stick and calling it names (or any other reason) the facts remain clear. Now, removing tanking from the game would mean many, many changes. Healing would have to become much more dynamic and would need the ability to either switch targets more rapidly or more area of effect utility. DPSers would need to be able to take more of a beating, making the cloth DPSers more vulnerable. Raids encounters would in many cases have to be entirely rethought.
As someone who spends about 75% of my time in World of Warcraft tanking, it would be a big change for me. I'm PvPing more and more now than I used to (especially now that there's actual, honest to murgatroyd players standing in my way in AV... I spent an hour in one match today crawling up to that flag over hunter bodies, it felt like) but I still tank and frankly enjoy tanking when I'm with a good group. I don't think I would like to lose that role from the game, even if I do sometimes wish I'd rolled a mage or warlock instead.
Generally my answer to the question is yes. Not only do I personally like tanking, but I think the game has been designed and has evolved around the tanking idea: the paradigm shift would require too much alteration to the game at this point. What do you guys think? Should WoW move away from the three role mindset or should we keep on tanking?
I was browsing the various webcomics and blogs I read when I stumbled across the Lost World of Warcraft site. I'm sure it's not new to a great many of you, and the information may not be earth-shakingly current, but the ease of having it all in one place to browse and the neat graphics available meant that I spent a while browsing it. I especially enjoyed looking over the Azshara Crater entry, since that's one of my favorite bits of speculation. I still think they should either make it a 25 man PvP battleground (since 25 is the new 40) or a raid instance zone similar to the CoT version of Mount Hyjal.
The site's a little behind the times (it seems to have stopped updating around the time TBC was in beta) but it's still a solid little snapshot of places that never got off the ground or which ended up removed or never intended for player consumption. I've flown over Elwynn Falls a whole lot of times and never even noticed that cabin.
So if you're interested in this kind of 'secret cow level' stuff, check it out. And if you can think of any places the site's missed, I'd like to know about them.
As gag reels go, I can't say this is the funniest one I've ever seen (and if you're at work, it'll have to wait anyway-- it's NSFW). But it is very interesting to see behind the scenes of the ever-more popular WoW-based web series The Guild. There are scenes collected here from the first three episodes, and it's cool to see the mostly unknown cast out of character and joking around in front of the camera.
They call this vid "a little thank-you to our subscribers," and say that episode 4 is "in the can" and coming soon. So enjoy, Guild fans.
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.
According to the latest additions to the patch 2.3 notes, obtaining all the available bag slots for your guild bank will cost you exactly 16,111 gold. So it's no wonder people are concerned about recruiting these days (though in fairness I received the e-mail below prior to any guild bank info going public). But seriously, somebody has to cough up all that cash . . .
Hi! I have read through your officer's quarters blog since day one and have enjoyed a lot of helpful information from each episode. I know you have touched on guild recruitment in the past, but I think it was a more direct response to a, in my opinion, small demographic of Wow guilds. I am the recruitment officer for a guild (shameless plug incoming: <Malleum Majorem> Lightning's Blade server -- www.malleum.com) and we are working VERY hard to get our second Kara group running in order to get into 25-man content. The biggest problem we are having is getting people to join. I think every guild, aside from the huge "everybody knows they are the best" guilds, has this same issue. We work hard to get people into the guild that share the same goals and philosophies. I have been broadcasting in the recruitment channel for weeks and it seems I get 1-2 people a week who ask questions. We consistently do all of Kara (except Illhoof and Nightbane, still earning those) every week. Do you have any fresh ideas or inner thoughts that can help me and my fellow recruiters around Azeroth get the numbers needed for progression?
Wreck from Addicted to WoW sent us his interesting opinion on the Season 3 gear required ratings. Why, he asks, didn't Blizzard put rating requirements on all the gear? When season 3 starts, the season 3 shoulders and weapons will require a high Arena rating to own (2000 and 1850), and Wreck wants to know why only the shoulders and weapons got put behind a rating wall. Why not make all the gear that much harder to get?
Yesterday a new build went live on the 
Blizzard stated that one of the reasons they choose the 
This blog post is careening
Do we need tanks?
I was browsing the various webcomics and blogs I read when I stumbled across the 
